Here’s what the research says on crunches. With this new information, I decided to dig into it more and talk to some experts to find out whether it’s fair to swear off crunches forever and, ultimately, whether we should even bother doing them. Plus, people have wised up to the fact that there are a lot of exercises out there that work multiple important muscles in the core at once (including the rectus abdominis), making crunches pretty unnecessary for a lot of people. Their main purpose is to work that rectus abdominis.Īfter doing some poking around online, I found that crunches have gotten a bad rap mostly thanks to research that’s connected them to spinal disc injury due to the repeated flexing and extending of the spine (in other words, crunching up and down over and over). Crunches do involve some of your other abdominal muscles, like the obliques, but to a lesser extent. It’s what you think of when you think of six-pack abs (which, come to think of it, is probably why crunches got so popular in the first place!). Quick refresher: The classic crunch-which is done by lying on your back with your knees bent, feet flat on the floor, and then contracting your abs to slowly lift your shoulder blades off the ground an inch or two-targets the rectus abdominis, the outermost abdominal muscle.

Essential crunch locations